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It goes way beyond a simple “he said/she said”. It’s the 24-hour news cycle broken down and deconstructed. It’s a Lifetime movie with megalodon teeth, a tour de force for a director that’s known for his dark, foreboding film work. Even with its bestseller pedigree, Gone Girl would be a significant cinematic achievement, mostly for all the things it avoids while getting so much of the mystery thriller genre 100 percent right.

Sure, there are the usual twists and turns, but they don’t dominate the narrative. Yes, we are stuck with a pair of unreliable narrators, but both deceive in (dis)service of the end result. With David Fincher at the controls and a series of subtexts strewn about, what could have been a basic missing persons drama becomes something far more meaningful, something far more daring. It’s terrific, and terrifying.

There are very few films as flimsy and false as Left Behind. The only thing Biblical about this clunky End of the World epic is that both the Word of the Lord, and the 16 book series created by evangelicals Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are printed on paper. Other than that, you have to search long and hard to find anything remotely religious about this first chapter in the ongoing judgment of mankind.

The Boxtrolls, very loosely based on the book Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow, is a movie made for an entirely different era and a wholly singular demo. It’s not a film created for today’s catered to and coddled kids. No, parents will be dealing with freaked out frightmares, thanks to this productions highly unusual character design.

The trolls themselves are unattractive little blobs with limited personality and a tendency to shriek at everything that happens. When they talk, their dialogue is virtually indiscernible and they tend to be unappealing in much of what they do.

It was the moment every fan was waiting for. After turning their previous work into a multi-million unit selling classic, the announcement of new material was met with the typical pop culture pandemonium. There was even something called “a video” to support the song, a chance to see the band actually recording the tune with help from USC’s marching band.

Yes, 35 years ago, Fleetwood Mac unleashed the title track to their album, Tusk, to a bemused and confused audience. Those expecting the crystal clear commercial appeal of the group’s Rumors, were instead stuck by a strange, surreal bit of primal percussion matched by writer Lindsey Buckingham’s menacing vocals. It was unlike anything the band had done before.

Fans of the book are going to be flummoxed. Instead of a faithful adaptation of James Dashner’s successful 2009 novel, the makers of The Maze Runner have decided to par away the wheat from the shaft, creating a compelling dystopian “what if?” that may not answer every question it proposes, but certainly gets significant mileage out of the premise presented.

There’s a lot to digest initially, with sci-fi babble names for certain elements and a real revisionist Lord of the Flies vibe to the ambiguous adolescent male community being carved out of this unusual circumstance. But once first time feature filmmaker Wes Ball dispenses with all the set-up, we are left with an inherently intriguing idea, to wit—what’s behind those massive walls, what is “the maze”, who created it, and what are those awful noises the kids hear howling through the night.